Songs of 1966 That Make Me Wish I Could Sing
By Elizabeth Crook,
Author of Monday, Monday: A Novel

All right, so I was only seven in 1966 -- not a child of the
sixties, but a child in the sixties. And I wasn't one of those
kids who knew about popular music. I spent most of my early years
in the small Texas town of San Marcos, hardly on the cutting edge
of pop culture. Music came to me in a spotty, haphazard and
completely disjointed way, and it wasn't until a few years ago,
when I started writing the novel Monday, Monday, a novel
that begins in 1966, that I found I had suddenly tapped into one
of the richest veins in American music. I was, of course, a few
decades behind everyone else. I had arrived at the sixties in my
fifties.

It's not that music was unimportant to me as a kid: I liked
singing. I sang along to Burl Ives records. I could sing as loud
as the next kid. I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with
other children on small bleachers in a small room at Crockett
Elementary, belting out a song in French that none of us knew the
meaning of. I thought the words were "Allawetta, John T.
Allawetta."

My dad was a politically liberal Baptist preacher who had
resigned as the pastor of First Baptist Church in Nacogdoches to
run for congress on a civil rights platform in 1961, and had lost,
and had taken a job as president of the San Marcos Baptist
Academy. When Lyndon Johnson became president he appointed my dad
director of VISTA and then Ambassador to Australia, which for me
meant a departure from San Marcos in 1967 to Arlington, VA and
then, in 1968, when I was nine, to Canberra.

In Arlington I was hooked on watching the Monkees and was really
into their theme
song, along with "Snoopy vs. the Red
Baron" by the Royal Guardsmen and "Honey" by Bobby
Goldsboro. But it was in Canberra that I first experienced a real
adrenaline rush from music. One of the guards at the embassy was a
marine named Gary Metcalf who guarded the embassy during the day
and would come back in his blue jeans in the evenings to join the
crowd outside that was protesting the Vietnam War. He had served
in Vietnam and knew what he was talking about. My Dad would get
him to come inside. Gary and I were buddies; we would hang out in
the living room listening to music. We listened to a lot of Bob
Dylan, but the songs I remember most from those times are the
Beatles' "Yesterday"
and Jimmy Durante's "One
of Those Songs." Gary found out that the butler was hiding
the pantry key under the candelabra in the dining room, so we
started raiding the pantry -- Gary would take the cigarettes and I
would take the chocolates. After Nixon was elected and sent my
family packing back to Texas, Gary came to see us in San Marcos.
He showed up with a monkey on his shoulder and the word "LOVE"
embroidered on the fly of his jeans. I was totally smitten. He
borrowed my dad's saddle to ride horseback through Mexico, and
came back without it. Later we were informed he had died in a
tragic skydiving incident. I miss him to this day, and have tried
to track down family or friends but can't find any connection.
"Yesterday" still brings a flood of tears.

I don't remember much music from middle school after our return
to Texas, except for the 45 record of Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry,
Starry Night)" I taped to the back of my 7th grade paper on
Vincent Van Gogh. I had a huge crush on Van Gogh, because of what
he did to his ear, and on Thomas Jefferson and David Cassidy, both
of whose posters hung in my room. Briefly, I took guitar lessons
and dreamed of being like Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary. I sat
around strumming and dolefully singing "The House of the
Rising Sun" and "Sittin' on the Dock
of the Bay", but nobody in my otherwise supportive family
ever suggested I "play that again." Eventually I got the message
and didn't.

By eighth grade my friend Gerri and I sometimes wandered
downtown to LBJ Street to hear the Jesus freaks play their music
in a room on the second floor over the J. C. Penney's. Not only
was the music free; anyone on the streets was invited in. The room
had to be accessed by a rickety set of outside stairs that were
meant for a fire escape. The music was essentially folk-rock and
the bands were terrific -- especially a local band named
Liberation Suite that later became popular and headed off to
Ireland and England. Their songs inspired
people to wave their arms wildly and sometimes speak in tongues.
Gerri and I loved the music but had to clear out between sets to
avoid getting counseled and witnessed to, and this meant a lot of
tricky timing and coming and going on the rickety steps.

In high school most of the music I heard was either at the
roller skating rink or during halftime on the football field,
followed by "Go Rattlers! Fang 'em!" The rest was blared out of a
DJ's speakers in the gym after the games.

Once a year we had lots of music at our local chili cook-off,
Chilympiad. In the beginning, Chilympiad was held at a tourist
resort called Aquarena and the bands played on the back of a
flat-bed truck. Later it moved to the civic center. Over the
years, we had Willie Nelson, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys,
Mickey Gilley, Ace in the Hole, Bobby Bare, Fiddlin' Frenchie
Burke and a lot of others. My favorite act at the Civic Center was
Johnny Rodriguez, who sang "Just Get Up and Close
the Door," "Pass
Me By if You're Only Passin' Through," and "Ridin' My Thumb to
Mexico."

But most of the year, we had to resort to the juke box at the
pizza parlor if we wanted to hear Johnny Rodriguez, and even that
was eventually off limits when the manager banned my friend Kelly
and me from playing it because we played Johnny's rendition of "That's the Way Love
Goes" too many times. Or was it because we sang along, and
didn't buy pizza?

The best known place for music in our neck of the woods was
Gruene Hall, the oldest dance hall in Texas, where Willie Nelson
and Jerry Jeff Walker and a bunch of other great country bands
played. But it was twenty miles down the road from us, and usually
too crowded to get into.

I sang a lot when I rode my horse -- mostly songs from John
Denver albums and The Sound of Music. After school I'd get
in my pickup and head to Mr. Storts' place where my horse was
boarded in a back pasture. I'd grab a bucket of sweet feed, stand
at the gate and yell for Trigo, and he'd come running. He'd eat
his feed and I'd jump on bareback and head for the cow pond. My
friends Gerri and Tammy had horses there too; we'd smoke Gerri's
father's fat Mexican cigars and ride our horses into the cow pond
singing "Sunshine on My Shoulders." The trick was to let the
horses wade out and start to roll before we slid off and swam
away. I once cut my foot in the cow pond, and to hide the red
streaks crawling up my leg I went to the dime store for taller
socks. There wasn't a lot of euphoric singing when my mother
spotted the streaks climbing out from the top.

I left for Baylor with my cousin in 1977, listening to Linda
Ronstadt on an eight track player in her blue Bronco, our hair in
heat rollers and our stuffed animals crammed against the windows
in the back. In my luggage I had two records to play in the dorm
room: My Fair Lady and Camelot. I wasn't the
coolest girl at Baylor.

One weekend when I was home seeing my boyfriend, who was a year
behind me and still in high school, I found some other girl's
picture in his wallet in place of -- or rather on top of -- mine.
She was the head majorette for the high school band. We were
standing in his room at the time, listening to Fleetwood Mac's
album, Rumours. The specific song playing was "Go Your Own Way."
No kidding.

After two years at Baylor I transferred to Rice and didn't hear
any music until I graduated. It was all I could do to keep up with
the reading material.

For the next thirty years, except for Neil Diamond and James
Taylor and a belated discovery of Leonard Cohen, it was all
country for me. I danced my children to sleep to Johnny Cash.

And then I started writing Monday, Monday. The story
wasn't about the music of the sixties, but about people who came
of age to that music, and I suddenly realized, listening to
sixties songs, that I knew most of them -- at least well enough to
sing along. How had I learned so many of them? Where had I heard
them all? It was strange and surprising to me to know them. It was
as if those songs had been playing as background music for my
whole life.

I've lived in Austin now -- a city known for its music -- for
twenty-five years. I'm embarrassed to say I almost never go to
venues like SXSW or to concerts. But when it's just me alone in
the car with the XM radio, I crank it up. I switch back and forth
between Willie's Roadhouse and Sixties on 6. And I love that the
title of my new book is Monday, Monday -- not only a song that brings
up echoes from my youth, but one that was actually playing on the
radio that terrible August day in 1966 when my novel begins.

Here are 16 songs from '66 that make me wish I could sing as
well as my editor, Sarah Crichton, who sings in FSG's house band ,
The Savage Detectives.

These are in no particular order, except for the first one,
which is my favorite:

Author Bio
Elizabeth Crook, author of Monday, Monday: A Novel,is the author of three novels, The Raven's Bride, Promised
Lands, and The Night Journal. She has written for
anthologies and periodicals, including Texas Monthly and the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and has served on the council
of the Texas Institute of Letters. Currently she is a member of
the board of directors of the Texas Book Festival. She lives in
Austin with her husband and two children.